


ant-man and the wasp and the black widow

by orphan_account



Category: Ant-Man (Movies), Marvel, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Childhood Friends, Alternate Universe - College/University, Corporate Espionage, F/F, Murder Mystery, hope has a physics doctorate, if marvel wont give me lesbians ill do it my fuckin self, it's a college au where no one is in college, scott is a professor, the undergrads live in fear
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-10
Updated: 2018-10-10
Packaged: 2019-07-29 06:48:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16258871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Hope van Dyne, newly graduated, must now put her doctorate-level knowledge of quantum physics to slightly less-than-legal use when someone from her long distant past turns up with evidence that her parents' disappearance ten years ago was actually a murder.





	ant-man and the wasp and the black widow

**Author's Note:**

> good morning everyone! what a lovely day to (checks time) release the first chapter of my magnum opus even though i haven't updated my other fic  
> this was meant to be a short and fun break from writing winterhawk all the time, and yet now i'm ditching homework to blitz it. nice. enjoy my hubris

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ant-Man and the Wasp (not 2018.)

Hope van Dyne doesn’t ask for much in life. A well-brewed cup of coffee will keep her going far past the early morning hours, and a perfectly-solved equation might even get her to crack a smile. Even a solid night’s sleep will usually leave her in a decent mood despite the fact that she is not (and will probably never be) a morning person. All in all, she’s pretty easy to please--provided, of course, that nobody rouses her from sleep after a three-day physics bender.

“I swear to god,” snaps Hope into her phone. “It’s twelve in the afternoon, most people are _sleeping_ at this hour--”

“Hope, it’s Monday,” says the disembodied voice of Scott Lang in her ear, which is far too close for comfort for someone who is _disturbing her rest._ “Literally nobody is sleeping at this hour.”

 _“I_ was sleeping.” Scowling, Hope jabs the speaker button on her phone and drops it onto her nightstand before struggling into a vaguely upright position and beginning the arduous process of extricating herself from her cocoon of blankets. “I’m pretty sure I count as ‘someone’ even if I’m not a bug or a small child—”

“Okay, so, here’s the thing,” blurts Scott, static crackling around his words, “I’m super sorry about waking you up ‘cause I know your sleep hours are important for doing quantum physics stuff and making sure you don’t kill someone for stupid lab practices but I _reeeeeeeally_ need your actual presence here right now. Please don’t be mad.”

“Scott,” replies Hope with a calm she doesn’t feel. “This is my first nap in fifty-two hours.”

“It’s an _emergency,_ ” insists Scott.

“No.”

“It’s a Wasp-mergency.”

 _“Hell_ no.”

“I’ll buy you Starbucks.”

“I’ll be over in an hour,” mutters Hope, because her number-one modus operandi basically boils down to “caffeine will get you everywhere” and bribery is apparently considered fair play to her best friend. On the bright side, maybe today will be the day her closet finally grants her a pair of matching socks.

 

* * *

 

See, it goes like this.

Hope has known Scott Lang since second grade. She spent most of her elementary school years at Scott’s house instead of her own, helping him catch and classify bug species in exchange for using his tree house as a holding space for her ever-growing collection of physics textbooks. They holed up for hours in Hope’s bedroom drawing call signs for superheroes who used the power of bugs and science to save fantasy realms. The summer before Hope’s parents vanished, Scott managed to get a few of their classmates in on the superhero origin story game; a bunch of fourth-graders with taped-on wings and construction-paper pincers trampled the front lawn every afternoon to catch bugs and save cats from trees. Scott’s mother forcibly imposed the buddy system after seeing how many unsupervised children were in her backyard, but Scott grabbed Hope’s hand almost immediately and dared the rest of his friends to laugh at the amazing superhero duo Ant-Man and the Wasp. Needless to say, they didn’t, and anyone who wanted to had long since fled the fringes of the bug squad by the time Hope snuck the rest of her classmates into her cavernous basement to show off the Wasp’s very own secret lab and interview a potential new agent.

(“I want to join you guys,” said the girl standing in Hope’s doorway. She wore a determined expression and a plaster on her nose, and Hope stared at her in awe as she realized this was the same girl who had delivered a stunning roundhouse kick to the jaw of a middle school bully during the school year. She was even prettier in person. Hope’s face heated up, and she double checked to make sure Scott and his gang were sufficiently distracted before grabbing the girl’s hand and tugging her inside.)

Two weeks later, the Black Widow vanishes from their small town, leaving only a whispered goodbye and a small black rock as evidence that she even existed in the first place. That night, Hope hauls herself up the side of Scott’s house and onto his windowsill and cries for an hour; Scott dutifully offers her a tissue and a large bowl of ice cream, and they park themselves on his bed watching _Avengers Assemble_ until Hope uncurls her left fist and shows her mysterious acquisition to him.

“Maybe she forgot about it,” says Scott reasonably, gnawing on the plastic spoon he’s been using to fish the cookie dough bits out from Hope’s bowl. “Lots of people forget things when they move out.”

“It was where she used to hide her spare key,” mutters Hope, jutting her chin out and daring him to judge her for snooping around.

“Wait, what?” Scott drops the spoon in surprise. “How come you got to go over her house and I didn’t?”

“‘Cos I’m the cooler one, that’s why,” crows Hope imperiously. Scott tackles her off the bed while demanding she take it back, and his mom appears seemingly out of nowhere to scold them both for being awake at two in the morning.

 

* * *

 

Hope yanks a brush through her hair in one swift movement as she rummages through her roommate’s extensive collection of makeup for the half-empty tube of concealer that’s been saving her life this semester. Pepper is the world’s biggest enabler for showing her the terrifyingly potent combination of makeup and coffee; most of the undergrads now firmly believe Hope is an immortal being fueled by quantum physics and a singular exasperation at Professor Lang’s creative escapades in entomology. (This week is going particularly horribly, as waves of ants keep stealing Hope’s lunch directly out of the faculty refrigerator.) At least Scott’s research is doing well, if the strange ant-related occurrences are any indication, although Hope has to wonder as she rushes towards the train what would prompt her best friend to refer to a code word neither of them have used since before they started their respective degree programs.

She doesn’t have long to wait. Two fairly painless subway trips with a transfer in between leave her standing in the heart of Bed-Stuy, barely a block away from Scott’s apartment walk-up; Hope’s suspicion magnifies tenfold when she is greeted at the station by three faces she hasn’t seen since her and Scott’s days of EHS student dorming.

“Hey, it’s Scottie’s physics friend!” Luis brightens visibly at the sight of Hope emerging from the underground, waving frantically from where he’s standing a mere few steps away. “How’s the living in Manhattan?”

“She’s a doctor now, show some respect,” chastises Dave with a very put-upon sigh.

“Oh, oh, you’re right. Sorry, Hope. Scottie’s physics doctor friend—”

“Man, that ain’t no better—”

Kurt is watching them with an expression that clearly says this conversation has been rehashed several times already, and Hope makes a solid attempt to stifle a snort of laughter as she greets the trio who made her undergraduate years considerably less miserable with their collective shenanigans. Luis and Dave pause their bickering to deliver congratulations on her newly-acquired doctorate in quantum physics before Luis launches into a Halloween story he heard from his aunt who heard it from his cousin who heard it from this drunk scientist at a bar with him who happened to work for MIT’s physics department regarding people shrinking down and disappearing, and Hope forces her best poker face because it’s probably a moot point to remind him that people don’t just _disappear_ when her parents’ ten-year absence from her life is direct evidence to the contrary. Graduating is much less fun when there’s no one to cheer you on but yourself.

Interestingly enough, Luis goes completely silent when they reach Scott’s stairs. Hope squints at him suspiciously.

“Scott told you something, didn’t he?”

“What qualifies as ‘slightly dead’?” blurts Luis, and then looks horrified. “Actually, wait—”

 _“Oh my god,”_ screeches Hope, and bolts up the stairwell. A golden retriever is lounging on the second landing, and she spares half a second to judge the hell out of whoever let their dog eat pizza in the middle of the stairwell before she shoulders open Scott’s front door and rounds on her bemused bestie.

“Scott, you better not have killed someone because you _know_ I haven’t perfected the technology to help you hide the body yet, I told you this like a whole year ago but please, _please, PLEASE_ tell me that information retained itself in your head—”

“She’s not completely dead!” Scott bursts out. “And it wasn’t even my fault! I found her in the dumpster outside and like, I think she’s only a little dead, but she doesn’t remember anything and keeps passing out and my medical training doesn’t extend past CPR but she doesn’t need that and to be honest I’m a little scared of getting near her—”

“I have a _physics doctorate_ , not a _medical license!”_ hisses Hope as she runs past him in a direct beeline for his bedroom (because Scott is predictable and doesn’t know the first rule of murder, which is not to put the dead body in the same place that you sleep.)

“Oh boy,” murmurs Luis faintly. Hope chooses to ignore him in favor of flinging open Scott’s bedroom door and revealing—

—Bright red hair, black jumpsuit and some sort of tactical gear, one hand clenched in the covers of Scott’s Hello Kitty duvet and the other curled loosely around a small piece of onyx that directly matches the stone currently resting above Hope’s collarbone.

 

* * *

 

“...Natasha?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ehehehehe


End file.
